cimorene

I drew this inspirational poster after

waxjism accidentally stepped in YouTube shorts and got caught against her will in the whirlpool for a few hours. She said I should share it because it's "cute" and "universal" ("No one likes YouTube shorts," she explained).

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Most of these were lettered in Lamy Vibrant Pink ink (the exceptions are obvious). They got a little yellower in color correction than they look IRL.

Wax and I have been collecting a quote of the month each month since 2011 I think. Usually these were things we laughed about or said repeatedly to each other while browsing the internet side by side; they arose verbally, is the key. Well, for almost all of 2023 we have been cat divorced: that is, hanging out in two separate rooms to babysit two separate cats who can't be together but get lonely if they don't have people with them. This has altered a lot of our habits and prevented us from remembering to pick quotes of the month.

But another thing that happened this year was that I bought a Hobonichi Techo planner, a Japanese planner brand that seems to have a cult following around the world. I needed a calendar for work, and I bought this brand because it's printed on Tomoe River Paper, one of the best papers for fountain pen writing in the world. The Techo planners have a quote of the day in them, but they're not at all like what a western person would expect from quotes of the day - sometimes they actually are quite wise, other times interesting, but in general they're often hilariously weird choices.

perhael and I have had a regular bonding ritual laughing about these quotations together, so much so that this year I bought the same planner to make sure I'd still have them.

So when I realized on the 31st that I didn't have quotes of the month to post,

waxjism and I went through my planner and picked a Weirdest Quote of the Day of the Month for each month. They were too long to letter like I've done the past few years, so they're in calligraphy instead. (Lettering is where you draw the letters. Calligraphy is more like writing, but just fancy, with stroke order and letterform rules to follow, although I find it more fun to bend the rules and combine styles.)

2022 Quotes of the Month, as well as all previous years

( 'Quotes of the Day' of the Month from the Hobonichi Techo 2023 )

Sample calligraphy:

( The Rest )

2021 Calendar Quotes of the Month and all previous years

And with no further ado, 2022's Calendar quotes of the month were:

January: Blorbo from my shows - Tumblr (KnowYourMeme entry)

February: Man, these bitch-ass aliens - Rosa on Roswell: New Mexico (waxjism's latest hyperfixation show, now tragically cancelled, but the character isn't her Blorbo)

March: It's like the grownups know what they're talking about - waxjism on house renovation advice from the experienced

April: Congratulations on spotting the broom in the room - princessofgeeks on the lost broom that turned out to have been in front of our noses the whole time

May: What year is it? - Tumblr on curious coincidences between the 2020s and the 1920s

June: No yanks on the thread - a viral Twitter thread by Australian parsfarce aka fungbunger about American monoculturism and ignorance of the rest of the world (Gawker writeup)

July: NO PUEDO CON ESTE HOMBREEEEE (I can't with this mannnnnnn) - a Twitter user on Dylan O'Brien in a singlet

August: I am the piña colada of mental health - c3rvida3 on Tumblr

September: Do fish have skulls? - cimorene

October: Bats don't fly backwards - a video from... TikTok maybe?

November: You are in a yellow wallpaper situation - Princess Weekes on Don't Worry Darling, YouTube

December: FRÜHR WAR MEHR LAMETTA! ("There used to be more tinsel") - German proverb, from the 1977 film Weihnachten bet Hoppenstedts

Following my "tradition" begun (randomly) last year, I lettered all of them this year too! SNEAK PEAK:

( and all thirteen of them )

This is what I did while we were rewatching, by the way. I should probably have been knitting instead, but I'm in love with the limited edition olive Sport and matching Herbin Empire Green [a review because product listings never have adequate photos] ink cartridges I got myself last holiday season. Anyway, here they all are!

Wax's cousin and cousin-in-law and cousin once removed and aunt and uncle departed this morning, after cooking dinner last night. We drank one bottle of Wax's and my favorite wine (a Chilean gewürtzraminer) and then consumed two pots of mango and peach black tea. Wax's brother and goddaughter left by train yesterday from Turku, but we're gonna see them again soon. We immediately unrolled the rag rugs and bathmats (to cover the oak parquet, which is unpleasantly slippery on floofy bunny feet) and distributed bunny fort, cushion, and boxes of hay back into the dining room so that both bunnies could be freed. There were binkies. Tristana immediately came downstairs, where she then immediately curled up next to Snookums on the cat cushions in the kitchen window and went to sleep.

Most of the time lately I have been lettering, or drawing letters freehand, rather than practicing calligraphy, where letters are formed with a predetermined number of strokes which go in predetermined directions. But I do like calligraphy! And I have decided to try to practice blackletter more, as it's the italic style I've spent the least time on... even though in general it seems to be the most popular italic style for modern calligraphers, probably because it's the most impressive and formal. Here's some highlighter calligraphy: any wedge-shaped marker can be used for italic calligraphy, but it just doesn't work as well as a metal pen nib. (Quicker and easier than filling pens, however.)

Are you familiar with that thing where if you're drawing letters that take a lot of work, instead of just writing, you forget to pay attention to what you're doing and leave out a letter or draw them out of order or whatever? This happens all the time, usually resulting in misspelled words, but it was surprisingly difficult to write "regerts" instead of "regrets" here - I had to start with the center "e" and go alternately to right and left.

These are really the last ones from my compulsive spell of lettering my favorite Tumblr-characteristic memes a few days ago (I stayed up late two nights in a row and they ultimately occupied 7 A4 sketchbook pages).

In sharing them with my parents, who are familiar with almost no memes, I learned (because of providing the context from knowyourmeme each time lol) that "they crave that mineral" originated with sixpencee on Tumblr (you may remember them from the later Tumblr child slavery debate); the early 20th c. poem which "icebox plums" refers to is by American poet William Carlos Williams and is called "This is Just to Say"; Spiders Georg, Old as Balls, Children's Hospital/Color Theory, Moon Moon, Hold My Flower, and "Harold, they're lesbians" originated on Tumblr; Miette originated on Twitter (tweet by Patricia Lockwood, 2019); Throwing Breadsticks in My Purse is a Tumblr meme but the originating post was stolen from Twitter; and Cow Poetry/I Lik the Bred comes from well-known Reddit poet Sam Garland/Poem for your sprog. Of course, Plinko Horse is so recent that everybody probably remembers that it originated with a computer modeling demonstration and became a meme via YouTube. Smooth Sharks originated with cartoonist Branson Reese on Twitter.

My wife was moved to make a post about the unexpected deluge of would-be tenants to replace our tenant who gave a month's notice. Apparently there is areal shortage of rental housing in town. Personally, I was hoping the fact there's only one bedroom (and that the whole flat is only 51 m² - 549 ft²) would have put off some people, like the ones with children, but Wax already talked to 3 who were still excited anyway, and tragically they all seem pleasant, so we're definitely not looking forward to telling anybody no. Also we can't show anybody the flat for at least a week; it's currently full of boxes as well as the tenant's junk, and her normal state of living is even more cluttered and messy than ours. We're gonna have to call and talk to them all again once she's moved some stuff.

In a burst of energy sparked by inability to do anything about this situation yet, I made a heroic effort and managed to squeeze even more recycling into piles of bags and boxes awaiting the return of the van (it's nightmarish. There's Leaning Towers of Recycling dotted around the front of the house). I was kind of surprised they fit. But I was able to clear the counter enough to completely take everything off it and scrub it down with a magic eraser. I'm thinking we will actually oil the butcherblock now, something you're supposed to do every six months but which we haven't done since October 2020. Butcherblock is beautiful, but I do REALLY wish we'd got the whole counter out of stainless steel. There's nothing like avoiding the necessity of logging into a government employment website to stoke enthusiasm for oiling butcherblock!

And in all the subsequent excitement, I nearly forgot that Snookums had his first meeting with rain today!

We don't take the cats out when it's raining, but I didn't realize it had started raining when I put the leashes on them today. We found out when I opened the outer door, and I tried to just turn around, but Snookums wasn't sure what he was looking at and he hesitated, and then demanded to have the door opened again. So I opened it again and tried to point out that it was wet out there. He took a couple of steps onto the stoop and then... ran away from the door instead of towards it. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, but then when he found out it was still raining on him he ran away another few yards and stopped again. The third time he finally figured out how to run back towards the house and darted between my legs, entangling them in the leash so that I teetered on one foot and ended up losing my clog and putting the foot down bare and getting gravel stuck to it. So once I did manage to catch the cat and carry him inside, I had to walk quite carefully.

Meanwhile he was deeply offended that he was STILL being rained on even while in my arms and when I put him down inside he was still extremely dismayed. He stomped around yelling about it for a while, then went upstairs to tell Wax about it loudly, in her face, and I had to drop my recycling and come rescue her. He needed to be firmly hugged for quite a while before he got over it.

Also here is a chunk of the lettering I was inspired to do based on popular memes from Tumblr.

Saw something about native Tumblr memes and popular Tumblr memes and did a lot of lettering. (These aren't all native to Tumblr, but they've all been popular there.)

How is it that nobody in the writer's room or thereafter on this show read enough Wikipedia at least, if they didn't already know just from speaking English, to learn how the word "genetics" is actually used? Everybody is constantly talking about "my superior genetics"[sic], "separating his genetics from [other guy]'s"[sic], "amending my genetics"[sic], "breaking the link between their genetics"[sic] (the latter being a magical link between a clone and the original that means if one dies the other does, which is a pretty neat trick and sounds like quantum entanglement more than anything else although obviously not exactly like anything real, but how it could be part of genetic code or affected by gene therapy is another matter). It's like the show was written by a harassed high-school student as their final exam in English class and they learned the word "genetics" but felt they didn't have time to fuss with all the nuances of related terms and concepts like "gene", "sequence", "dna", "genetic code", "gene therapy", etc, hoping their teacher would be in too much of a hurry to grade everyone's papers to take points off.

These aren't actually my thoughts, per se. They're just bits of the conversation between

waxjism and me that tickled my fancy and that I then made into lettering.

Wax's been rewatching Roswell for like a week because she pauses every minute or two to type notes about it, like liveblogging, but on her phone, which obviously takes a lot longer. Earlier today she watched sixteen minutes of 3x01 in about two and a half hours. I suggested she post some of it already because she would surely have like 45 pages by the time she finished season 3, but she was shocked and horrified: "I'm not making these to POST. These are for ME." (Some of this with the sound on, some of it wearing headphones, so I have observed a certain amount.)

Wax's favorite way to engage fannishly with film is to read other people's recaps, reactions, and reviews. She used to spend all her time at TWP when she watched a show. So I didn't think it was that weird for her to be entering recap (reaction? liveblog?) fandom, but since she currently hates to be perceived, it actually makes perfect sense that she's writing the world's most detailed recaps for herself, just to pore over.

Some more of

waxjism's unfortunate tv habit including

cathexys' favorite quote.

They all miniaturized, but not equally legibly.

Our household's quotes of the month saved on our calendar, as continued from 2019 after the ignominious failure last year due to calendars getting lost in the move.

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And for the first year ever, I spent today lettering all of these. Why? ?¿?